luckily the science of the boy crisis appears pretty flimsy:

""... look more closely at some of the longest-running data about school trends, and the picture that emerges isn't so neatly polarized—or so readily PET-scanned, either. The truth is that by 1980, women had already reached parity with men on college campuses. Over the next two decades, as women continued to get college degrees in ever greater numbers, there's evidence to suggest that girls' gains at the pre-college level weren't as striking and don't appear to have been at the expense of boys. A paper titled "Assessing Gilligan vs. Sommers" surveyed "gender-specific trends" in the well-being of American children and youths between 1985 and 2001 by, among other things, assembling National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores for reading and math skills over the decade and a half—for ages 9, 13, and 17.

""The graphs that emerged aren't very exciting: The trend is relative stability for all, rather than marked mobility for either gender. Boys' reading scores have declined somewhat over the past decade, but they were lower than girls' from the start; girls' scores have barely budged.

"" Meanwhile, math scores have risen slightly for both girls and boys. Gender gaps are negligible for 9- and 13-year-olds, while high-school boys hold a slight edge over their female peers. The percentage of females between 18 and 24 with high-school diplomas, too, held steady—at about 85 percent; in 2001, the percentage of males with diplomas dropped slightly below what had been a pretty stable 80 percent.""

[..]
""Viewing school issues primarily through a gender lens has a way of encouraging a search for one-size-fits-all prescriptions for each sex. But what the array of motley evidence about males suggests is the wisdom of being wary about just that. It's worth noting that boys' test scores tend to be more variable than girls', with more of them at the tippy top, and many more down at the bottom. There may be biological forces at work, but at the moment the most marked contrasts in educational performance and college attendance show up between races and social classes; ...""

[ 02 February 2006: Message edited by: Geneva ]

It's all very mired in particular forms of quantified and quantifiable definitions of success -- statistically measured by education level, financial income, and things like IQ tests -- which explicitly embrace models of failures. This fundamental positivism is the bane of US and Canadian education. Mix it up with zero tolerance policies...

The article was on academic success... How does one do that without looking at good marks and continued education as a desirable end? If you want to measure success in academics by some other standard, what would that be?